I think I heard that the 8800 series is better than the 9600 series, but is the 9800 better than the 8800? If the 8800 is better than the 9600, is that all 8800's? Even the 320MB one??

I'm confused....

Well now that the 8 series is being phased out it looks sorta like this.

9800GX2 is Nvidia's fastest single card.
The 9800GTX is a slightly faster G92 8800GTS which means it's slower than the old 8800Ultra.
The 9600GT is an 8800GT--the performance is a little higher in some places and a little lower in others.

I suggest you take a look at anandtech's 98000GX2 and GTX review if you want to see where they all lie number wise.

Hope that makes a little bit of sense at least. Nvidia's whole product lineup is a bit screwy if you ask me.


Cheers

The 9600GT is not an 8800GT....it has half the stream processors and lower clocks. It performs surprisingly well though, and no-one seems to know why. But the 512mb 8800GT beats it in benchmarks.

Basically what I think happened was Nvidia were preparing the 9xxx series, and saw ATi were about to launch some decent cards....the 3800 series. Panicking, Nvidia released their 9-series cards as 8-series cards, so that they had something out there to compete right away. And now we're seeing the 8800GTS 512 core being re-used in the new 9800 series.

The 8800 Ultra and the 9800GTX are pretty much neck and neck at lower resolutions, but as you increase the pixels, the more RAM and the better memory interface help pull the Ultra ahead.